If anything, it shows that people are frustrated they died and are going to "Play the damn dungeon until I beat it". Designing a game to be as "engaging" as possible is the wrong metric. It should be as "enjoyable" as possible, which will itself result in engagement.

Focusing primarily on engagement results in the same kind of manipulative mechanics that cause Facebook and MMORPG games to be so compelling, while simultaneously being boring.

That isn't to say you're manipulating us of course. I do believe you're trying to make the best game possible. But imagine for a second that the game is F2P with micro-transactions. In that case, no death warning would be the best possible option since it would cause people to lose gold and then make a payment to purchase more. Or, should I say, best possible option for the bottom line.

gjaustin wrote:If anything, it shows that people are frustrated they died and are going to "Play the damn dungeon until I beat it". Designing a game to be as "engaging" as possible is the wrong metric. It should be as "enjoyable" as possible, which will itself result in engagement.

Focusing primarily on engagement results in the same kind of manipulative mechanics that cause Facebook and MMORPG games to be so compelling

My entire involvement in the thread can be attributed to this interpretation applied my own deaths by non-voluntary missclicks or game bugs. The more pointless the death, the less sense of closure, the more need to try again. The game was without question the most engaging while Unity Bug was crashing Gaan'Telet, and this phenomenon is something I know rather well from personal expirience with gambling. Which I avoid like the plague.

If the game needs it, well, fine, if not... It's a really wrong way to engage your customers, I'd say.

EDIT: But all my complaints can and will be fixed with inteface and imput improvement, so no real complaints from me.

BUT!

Is anyone esle frankly stunned that 34% of the runs end in deaths?

Ways to die:

- Risk a dodge (Need to be a rogue, more or less)- Miscalculate (can hapen to anyone, but there's a button wihch tells you straight up whether you'll die)- Involuntary missclick (Can't be helped, but playing in fulscreen has)- Get blocked off (Cant be helped in some places, and patches can do this to you sometimes)- Can't be bothered to look for where the entrance was so you suicide on purpose (I do this in challenge runs)- Reveal a bit of fog with the movement that puts you next to a monster letting it regenerate a sliver of health because of which it survives your intended first strike hit (niche)

I can't believe these account for 1/3 of all run ends. There's a tile that you can click on and leave the dungeon, if you can't find any monsters which don't tell you you'll die if you click on them? Doesn't anyone but me ever use it?

If the metrics are counting runs where suiciding is just quicker than looking for the exit or pressing menu/surrender, than there something wrong with them.

Is it the wrong way? Is it different than how Dark/Demon souls engages you? I know in my playings of those games that dying pushed me forward. Lack of death made me lazy and lead to dying which pushed me forward. I remember reading design studies on it and similar thoughts were made to the statements disleksia just made. Death gives you a chance to think about what you know, what you did, what could be different and re-evaluate with new eyes.

I do think though that we are over all looking at this game with a bit too much history and grinding on the frustrations that comes with the top 1-10%. I do know playing the alpha (without all the fancy predictions we have today) that dying did reengage my brain to keep hammering at the problem. While grinding out the few remaining achievements the vet have, misclick dying is the one last speed bump you have and feels like a design flaw. There is likely a lot to be learned from dying(which is ultimately a results of not reading information correctly or not making good choices).

I do agree though that the statistics may not fully represent what is expected if the majority of the games come from veterans. Not that I expect such statistics be released I am sort of curious on how many new retained players the game has picked up in the last few months?

Post Lujo Edit: There may be many players lacking the insight of you or any of us. Many more playing than participating or even reading these forums. It could simply not occur to some to retire. It may yet still not occur to people to read and understand combat prediction(It says death? What does death mean? This game has no manual, I will understand it later when it is documented!) It is a common problem of forums, many forum frequenters think they represent the voice of all players. People who crave info think everyone does, those who don't crave info don't think to look for it.

Yep, you're pretty much right on all counts, I guess. Well, just to clarify my stance on death in games, I played through the original AvP as a young child. On all difficulties, with everything, and it's still the best and most engaging shooter expirience I've ever had. Wouldn't dream of trying it with a save game feature.

EDIT: On the other hand most people found it offputting and the concept never really caught on in the genre, to my great dissapointment. EDIT2: And most people were clamoring for a save game feature to be imlemented, and by the time a completely pointles one WAS implemented, the gaming comunity had allready written the game off as "unplayable". Then it took a decade (or more?) for Demon Souls to get released -.-'

Interface improvements will fix my particular gripes for sure, but those metrics still feel odd. If puzzles and challenges are counted in there then they don't paint the picture right at all.

EDITED IN TO AVOID SPAMMING:

@Speedbal: intentionaly leaving in mechanisms which would let people die through no fault of thier own because it increeses "engagement" would be wrong. I'm not saying anyone's doing it (well with a straight face I'm not), but if someone was then it would be kind of objectinable. I remember a spotlight video with some guy and one of the devs, where the guy said "and death protection, or as I like to think of it missclick protection", so the issue was there and it's being worked on (and has allready been improved by several things, like the combat predictions and stuff). So yay!

@Dreamdancer, below ^^: Dying after you kill the boss probably happens to everyone (except possibly Sidestepper ). If all you have left is lvl 8 or 9 guys or hard candy, and you've spent a big bunch of resource on the boss(es) you're in a strange situation of hightened danger, false security and haste to get on with it.

Last edited by Lujo on Wed Dec 12, 2012 7:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I was one of those people, who needed a long time to realise that one can retire from a dungeon

From my point of view, a warning (beside the death note) isn't really needed. As Lujo pointed out there aren't many cases when one can die, if one pays attention to the combat prediction.

Think most of my deaths in the resent past resulted from a victory after which i wanted to kill all remaining monsters and didn't really paid attention to the combat prediction. Don't know if this is more annoying or embrassing.

Demons' Souls punished inattentiveness and rushing. Dark Souls the same. They reward patience and careful planning. They balanced between taking an easy but reliable road(many bosses dungeons had ways to cheese but almost always were time consuming) vs a skillful faster road. One misclick will not usually kill you in them no, but the general lack of attention that could lead to it would. Same applies. We are also talking in manners of scale. You are talking losing 15-30 minutes and some gold in DD, vs potentially hours of forward progress and souls in DS.

I appreciate the sentiment but I feel(though won't accuse) that you ignored the rest of what I said to jump on that lead in statement. I don't believe losing to a misclick is necessarily fun, however the fear that seemed to be presented was that by preventing it entirely you may throw the baby out with the bath water and lose the value of death to a new player. If you look at the discussions lately they are a bunch of grizzled vets discussing what various things are overpowered and complaining about the one thing that makes them lose. Not saying that invalidates feedback but it certainly colors it.

Well, I'm usually the guy in the "grizzled vets" thread that's arguing how things are actually fairly well balanced. My moaning has mostly been limited to the Gold challenges, since they make the Vicious dungeons look easy in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, I liked both Demons and Dark Souls. I just found the latter to have far more places where you can't dodge (e.g. narrow ledges, water), enemies with wonky hit boxes (e.g. skeleton wheels), and general things that were seemingly only there to make your life miserable (e.g. ghosts, reviving skeletons, the Crystal Cave).

Is it really fun to fight those archers in Anor Londo that knock you back 10 feet and off a narrow ledge when you block one of their shots? Or to fall off one of the invisible paths in the Crystal Cave because you stepped just a tiny bit too far in one direction? Or having to repeatedly do the entirety of Sen's Fortress because they decided to hide the bonfire?

Those feel like obnoxious decisions to me. They're aren't fun. In DD, I wouldn't mind a partial death warning system. Only warn if you:

1) Just clicked a glyph that you don't have mana for (this avoids a death due to attacking instead of a fireball).2) Attacked a monster more than 2 levels higher than you (avoids outright misclicks).3) The monster will survive the attack with <5% health and you die (avoids situations where combat prediction is off or you accidentally revealed a tile).4) You desecrate JJ.

xspeedballx wrote:If you look at the discussions lately they are a bunch of grizzled vets discussing what various things are overpowered and complaining about the one thing that makes them lose. Not saying that invalidates feedback but it certainly colors it.

Well, to be fair the thing we were recently complaining about is actually really overpowered and a bit disruptive when you take kingdom progression into perspective. It's strange that some of us (me in particular) still treat this as a beta, but there are a few gameplay kinks that could do with a bit of ironing out to provide for a smoother overall expirience. Plenty of folks've been wrong about plenty of stuff, but we've also been very right about stuff, and the current discussions are all stuff that was supposed to get feedback but never really did.

Though it's a bit arcane and it makes me So much so that I've started editing my comments into previous posts just so my name isn't everywhere

EDIT: But I'm not worried, as long as it's polished to perfection when it hit's Steam, we'll be up to our ears in newbies. Or at least the steam forum will.

But this particular topic is sort of resolved - small interface improvements (well from the user perspective) will certanly reduce the number of pointless misclick deaths, as all the ones so far have. I mean, there IS a warning button, it's a small screen that sayes "Death" or "Win", and if anyone's too manic to look at it then he had it coming (Anyone try playing Demon Souls blind?). It'll work before release - every time it goes faulty, even people who rarely post hit the bug thread.

And in case you didn't notice, I wasn't complaining about the one thing that makes me lose. My own stupidity, carelesness, overconfidence and Patches the Bad News Bear are hardly something the dev's can influence. I was actually trying to steer the discussion towards an aspect of the missclick bussines which something can be done about. For much the same reasons and much of what Disleckia said in mind (except those metrics still seem strange).

xspeedballx wrote:If you look at the discussions lately they are a bunch of grizzled vets discussing what various things are overpowered and complaining about the one thing that makes them lose. Not saying that invalidates feedback but it certainly colors it.

I dunno if I count as a grizzled vet or not (I just shaved!) but I lose all the time, for entirely fair reasons. I don't complain about those losses (too much) because they're fair. I'll get to the end, realize I'm X away from beating the boss, and realize: if I'd only saved that one mana potion instead of blowing it on a few extra bonus XP, or if I'd only regenerated an extra tile to eke out one more fireball to take advantage of burning, or if I had only foregone that not-very-useful Troll Heart I could have bought those sexy new Martyr Wraps and they would have done the job. Etc. etc.

The only truly frustrating losses are the ones that occur for a reason other than my own screwups. Those are the ones worth whining about incessantly.